AustLit

'One of the most significant Indigenous Australian authors, Ruby Langford Ginibi, a member of the Bundjalung Nation and the Sydney Koori community, took the courageous step in 1988, the year of the Bicentenary of British colonisation of Australia, of telling a largely ignorant non-Aboriginal audience about what it was like to live her life. She recorded this life in a pivotal text: Don't Take Your Love to Town. This book, as the pages which follow indicate, had a lasting impact on many readers, both in Australia and worldwide. Thus began an extraordinary writing career, a career seemingly out of step with an equally extraordinary life lived in bush camps and subsidised housing, raising nine of her own children and many of other people's, working in backbreaking menial jobs not considered suitable for 'white' women. This edition of the Journal of the European Association for Studies on Australia is to honour the life of Dr Aunty Ruby Langford Ginibi, her works and her contributions, large and public, larger and private, to literature and history, in Australia and worldwide, to institutions and individuals.' (Authors introduction, 1)